Is There Actually Any Benefit To Eating The Placenta After You Give Birth?

Kim Kardashian West blogged Monday that she’s consuming her placenta bit by bit following the birth of her second child, Saint, earlier this month. Naturally, the trendsetter has the Internet abuzz over the decision (she did it after having North, too). But is chowing down on your afterbirth a good idea?

Proponents of eating the placenta say that it can balance hormones, lower the incidence of postpartum depression, increase milk production and increase energy.

Doulas and midwives may recommend consuming the placenta—often cooked and prepared, in a smoothie or dehydrated, pulverized and split up into capsules—to stave off the “baby blues” and to boost lactation.

The basic theory is that there are important hormones and other components in the placenta, including B vitamins and iron, that are lost when it’s removed from the body, and that consuming it gives all that good stuff back to the mother.

But there is scant research into what nutrients one actually gets from eating the placenta, and those results have been mixed. Plus, if you’re steaming it, drying it and swallowing it in pill form days, weeks, or months after giving birth, it’s unknown whether there’s anything left that can actually do anything (if it ever could).

Though there are many purported benefits to eating one’s placenta, there’s virtually no scientific evidence to back up the claims.

“There’s a lot of information online about it. There are videos on YouTube about how to cook it and make pills out of it. But according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, there’s no indication that there’s any benefit to doing it,” Daniel Roshan, M.D., an assistant professor at NYU School of Medicine’s OB/GYN department, tells SELF. “There’s nothing in it you can’t get from supplements on store shelves.”

The practice is common in the animal world, but it’s been historically rare in humans. Over the past couple decades, however, its popularity is increasing.

Marisa Marraccini, Ph.D., is a psychology researcher in Rhode Island. The rise in placentophagy (or eating of the placenta) lured her out of her usual course of study to learn more about it.

“I was fascinated by it because there’s this trend of people gravitating toward it and when I started to research it I couldn’t find any research on it,” she tells SELF.

Placentophagy, the practice of afterbirth ingestion among humans, has grown among middle-class, white women in Western societies. Although the reasons for placentophagy are varied, it is generally promoted as a means to help postpartum women stabilize mood, enhance recovery, and increase milk production. Virtually no studies have explored the effects of placentophagy on humans…

Most of the literature on eating the placenta has been in the popular media and most of the evidence of its positive effects is anecdotal. One oft-cited study dates back to the 1950s and is full of holes, including the complete lack of a control group.

Another literature review, published online over the summer and appearing in the October 2015 issue of Archives of Women’s Mental Health, found 49 articles on the subject in scientific journals since 1950. The review investigated the 10 that were empirical studies (only four were done on humans) and determined that the results were “inconclusive.”

“There are a lot of great ideas for future research,” says Marraccini. “We just don’t have any clear cut conclusions.”

But even without scientific proof of efficacy, people believe in it—and it doesn’t appear to be dangerous.

“We don’t know if it’s safe,” Marraccini says, “although we do know that people are doing it and I haven’t read reports of significant problems.”

She cautions that there could be danger if the mother is a smoker, which could leave toxic residue in the placenta, or if the organ was stained by meconium (i.e. fetus poop), but hopes that doctors would warn women requesting to take their placentas home if there is any issue.

Dr. Roshan says there isn’t a lot of demand from patients at NYU to keep the placenta, but if a woman is determined he has no problem with it.

“Otherwise (I’m not going to) tell them it makes a huge difference,” he says. “The placenta is mostly cholesterol and some enzymes, so I’m not sure exactly what you could get from it.”

And although there is no hard evidence that it does anything at all for you, women are probably going to keep doing it anyway (especially if celebrities keep touting it in the news).